AMERICAN WORKING CLASS HISTORY

...article by Edsall "summarized, once again, the economic changes that have devastated the American working class over the last 40 years.  Hourly wages adjusted for inflation have been nearly stagnant since 1964, and the middle class has shrunk.  The de-industiralization of the US--which has gone much further than in the major European countries--has devastated working class communities in states like Michigan and Ohio.  In a rational world, all this would have strengthened what is supposed to be our left wing party, the Democrats, and led to legislation which would have reversed some of these trends.  But this is not happening. Why?" DK

This is nothing new, really.

Just one of the difficulties has been that labor issues have not been uppermost, as they should have been, since labor unrest began. Even the Democratic Party normally mainly only paid lip service to this issue. There never was here a so called Labor Party, as there was in Britain, or anything like it.

There never was a preponderant lobby in Congress strong enough to overcome countervailing management interests there. Government, and very importantly, the police power,  were almost always mainly for management. 

The Supreme Court played a key part as well, for decades, in retarding labor oriented federal legislation. Child labor is a locus classicus apparently.

See "Labor History of the United States" Wikipedia article and component articles.